Borrell on wheels

From European Voice's Entre-Nous column

5/23/07, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 4/23/14, 8:42 PM CET

How are the mighty fallen. Josep Borrell, who was president of the European Parliament from 2004 until the start of this year, has been laid low. A knee operation means that he has had to use crutches or an electric scooter to get around.An electric scooter (distinguished from an electric wheelchair by the presence of handlebars) can move at around 1.7 metres per second, or 6.4 kilometres per hour. He might be able to work up a faster speed in the Parliament’s Brussels palace, on the bridge that slopes from the Paul Henri Spaak building to the Altiero Spinelli building. The photographs of past presidents of the Parliament that adorn the walls of the bridge would pass by in a blur.Borrell can reflect that things could be worse and were so once. According to wheelchair-user Irish MEP Brian Crowley, who is also co-president of the Union for Europe of the Nations Group, access to the Parliament’s Strasbourg building has “improved dramatically” since it was opened in 1999. It is no longer necessary to have a security card to use the lifts and most of the meeting rooms now have wheelchair access. But Crowley says it is still impossible to reach the bottom of the hemicycle unaided. An architectural solution is to enter the hemicycle floor from behind the president’s chair, but Borrell is unlikely to find himself behind the president’s chair again any time soon.

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